Robotics

Photos: First look at J&J’s Ottava surgical robot

Johnson & Johnson’s Ottava surgical robot has four robotic arms that come out from underneath the operating table. Photo credit: Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson MedTech unveiled its long-awaited Ottava surgical robot after winning FDA de novo authorization. It’s the world’s first table-integrated, soft-tissue robotics system. The robot-in-table design is meant to save space in the operating room, with J&J saying its novel architecture takes up 30-50% less space tha

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Johnson & Johnson MedTech has received FDA authorization for its Ottava surgical robot, which is designed as the world's first table-integrated soft-tissue robotics system. The robot features four arms built directly into the operating table that tuck underneath when not in use, reducing operating room space by 30-50% compared to traditional boom-and-cart systems. The system includes redesigned surgical instruments, such as a needle driver with separate cut and suture modes and improved scissors, developed based on surgeon surveys identifying common problems like accidental suture cuts and dull cutting tools. The Ottava system can automate setup and breakdown procedures, save time during workflows, and integrate with a digital ecosystem for data collection and training.

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Google DeepMind releases new advanced robotics AI model and next-generation gene prediction model

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Gemini Robotics 2.5 accelerates real-world general dexterity

Our most capable vision-language-action model enhances robot dexterity, reliability, and safety

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Can AI agents program industrial robots without training data? Berkeley says yes

The new RoboSimStudio is an open-source project that enables agentic AI coding of robotic simulation environments. | Credit: UC Berkeley UC Berkeley and NVIDIA have released open-source tools for a new approach: enabling teams of AI coding agents to write, simulate, and refine readable robot programs. Since the early days of industrial robots, programming, tuning, and troubleshooting robotic workcells has taken weeks to months. New research coming out of UC Berkeley has demonstrated that new age

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Boston Dynamics adds wheels to Atlas humanoid to test whole-body control

Bridging the divide between deterministic physics-based control and policy-driven adaptation, Boston Dynamics has deployed a hybrid locomotion architecture on a wheeled variant of its Atlas humanoid. The “experiment” combined classical model-based motor control with whole-body reinforcement learning to maintain dynamic stability across unstructured, real-world terrain. In the video, Andy Wu, controls engineer for Atlas at Boston Dynamics, highlights some recent experiments that he

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Practice Makes Precise: At CoRL, NVIDIA and Partners Reveal How Robots Rehearse Delicate Work in Simulation

Simulation, which has long been the proving ground for robots learning to walk, roll and hop, is now helping researchers teach robots tasks that require a finer touch: aligning gears, connecting cables and assembling small components.  The shift from locomotion to manipulation is taking center stage at this week’s Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Austin, Texas, alongside the rise of agentic robotics — a new paradigm that integrates frontier agents to create interpretable code for physical

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Memories.ai builds standardized egocentric video pipeline

Memories.ai models label every clip: Memories-H0 for hand pose, EgoAction for action segments. | Credit: Memories.ai Memories.ai is building a data pipeline for robotics companies that combines standardized video collection with AI-powered annotation to turn everyday egocentric footage into training data for robots. The San Francisco-based company is developing software and AI to help robots understand the physical world. It builds video-understanding models and data infrastructure, and it colle